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Installing BackTrack to Dual Harddisk IBM R52

Okay where to start.

Previously I had Backtrack 1 and 2beta installed to my Primary Hard Drive on my laptop (because I always scratch cd's, usb usually snaps off and i hate the noise the bt cd makes every time i am waiting for something to load).

Taking the easy root all partitioning, creating of swap and ext3 partitions were handled using Acronis software. Overwrite grub with Acronis bootloader so I could select Win XP, IBM recovery partition and BT.

This was a real bummer for a number of reasons:

1) I had to sacrifice my Windows storage.
2) bootloader kept getting corrupted or just did not want to play ball

Anyway now I have vista ultimate I do not want to play around as with XP I always needed to carry my Acronis bootloader disk because the mbr used to screw up ...a lot!

So I opted for a 2.5" Momentus and the IBM thinkpad ultrabay, so i could just remove the DVD drive, slot in the BT2 drive and voila. I never use the DVD with BT so was not fussed at the compromise. I have so many 2gb thumb drives and on-line ftp server that I have no need for this drive with BT2.

Initially I tried installing the drive in the main bay and booting from CD to install, however when I switched it round, and booted from the HDD on ultrabay I always got "error 15" as it was looking for /dev/sda/ and was finding Vista. I then went away and thought about it, the best way would be to install using the drives in the correct configuration.

First I deleted all partions and volumes in the XP/vista disk snap in.

Next I opened the ISO of BT2 to my 1GB thumb drive which will remain BT2 forever as its very handy. Now Vista always blocks you when you want to write directly to disk like making a CF card of slax bootable and the same applies for usb thumb drives.

So I booted my Tablet Portege and ran the bootinst.bat on the thumb drive.

I then stuck BT2 usb in my thinkpad and boot from usb with the below configuration and settings.

Ran thru Jabra's Hard Drive installation guide replacing "sda" with "hdc" as the unpartitioned Momentus drive which is the target for BT2 has no volume and is not identified anywhere else.

Using fdisk I created the partitioned the drive as laid out in the guide, changing only the swap file size to 1GB. Then creating ext3 format partitions on hdc1 and hdc3using the guide and the mkfs command.

Next I started the gui, again this is in the guide.

using the BackTrack installer I used source, "/boot"

location "/tmp/bt2" be careful not to use /mnt/sda or /mnt/hdc

mbr should be "/dev/hdc/" other wise you will overwrite your sda mbr.

this takes time because the usb is decrompressing 700mb to 2700mb. as you need to select the hard disk install option.

Once done, exit BT2 restart unplug usb and you system should boot to BT2.

I prefer the boot order in my bios as when I use Vista I will not have the BT2 drive in, but the DVD and when I want to boot BT2 I just remove the DVD, just hot swapping between reboots.